What’s the most popular black-and-white film developer?
This is a list of the 35 black-and-white film developers, from most to least common, based on 202 responses from the #believeinfilm and film photography communities on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon.
Folks, your response was overwhelming but also very informative — thank you.
It started as a simple poll with four options: Rodinal/HC-110/DD-X/Other. But there’s a whole world of black-and-white film developers and a passionate community of people who use them, many of whom left a comment naming a favourite or several.
I was expecting Rodinal to be the most popular option, but it turns out it’s slightly behind HC-110 in this poll. Together, these developers accounted for about 50% of all votes.
Black-and-white developers by popularity:
-----------------------------------------
49 HC-110
46 Rodinal
--------------50% of all votes------------
14 Xtol
11 D-76
11 DD-X
9 510 Pyro
5 Diafine
5 FX-39
5 ID-11
4 FX-55
4 LC 29
3 Black, White & Green
3 Caffenol
3 D-96
3 Microphen
3 XT-3
2 D-19
2 D-23
2 Fomadon
2 Ilfosol 3
2 Ilfotec HC
1 Acufine
1 Adox XT-3
1 Amaloco AM 74
1 Bellini Euro HC
1 Flic Film Elementary
1 Fujifilm SPD
1 FX-37
1 LegacyPro EcoPro
1 Pyrocat HDC
1 Rollei Supergrain
1 T-Max
1 LQN
1 LQR
1 Foma Retro Special
The numbers count every mention in the comments (sorry, I couldn’t respond to you all!), plus the deduced number of votes from the poll widgets.
So if you put ID-11 and D76 together, they come in third. I don’t have a lot of expertise in developers. My interest is in playing with different cameras, so I use what I can get. I liked DD-X and TMax developers, but they were expensive and it began to be difficult to import chemicals, especially liquids, from the US. I switched to XTOL for a few years, and liked the results, but after experiencing “sudden death” syndrome twice, I’ve gone back to good old D76/ID-11. I buy whichever is available when I run out. In general, are developers of less significance in the “look” you can get out of a scanned negative plus photoshop curves than the film stock? My main concern is reducing apparent grain in the scanned negative. I do find Fuji Acros seems to look good directly from a flat scan, whereas the Ilford Delta films typically need to have the shadows boosted in Photoshop. I scan either with a flatbed and by DSLR macro lens for 35mm.
Dmitri
Dmitri
Dmitri
Howard Sandler edited on Jan 28, ‘26